I had occasion, yesterday, to seek the owner of the internet’s top-level domain name .ck. When I googled it, I was pointed to, among other info sources, that of Wikipedia. We — you, I and a lot of others — never cease to be amazed how many people have way too much time on their hands, and find all sorts of silly ways to use it

It’s the domain name for the Cook Islands, and it’s lent itself to some playfulness.

In a comment on my A-word posting (about Geoff Nunberg’s choice of a book title — The A-Word — that would allow the demure New York Times to cite it in print, despite the verboten word assholism in the subtitle), the commenter “John” writes:

Most notable of course is their handling of the book “The No-Asshole Rule.” See the author’s blog…

I don’t want to fall into the trap of being expected to catalogue every instance of taboo avoidance in the NYT — I’ve probably posted too often on the topic already — and I was sure that the paper had contrived to avoid asshole in the past (and dimly recalled a notable instance a few years ago), so I let the general principle of NYTasshole-avoidance stand, without exploring yet another case history. But, now, somewhat reluctantly, I’ll take up the story of Bob Sutton’s 2007 book The No Asshole Rule and how it fared in the NYT.

My posting on argument structure in porn (with a link to my posting on “Brads”) got picked up by Boing Boing, which brought me an enormous number of site views (7,201 on Friday, 3,225 on Saturday, 2,066 on Sunday, 1,075 on Monday, 717 on Tuesday; an ordinary day gets 200-300 views) and some new regular readers (and, so far, no vacuous or trash-talking comments on this blog).

I posted yesterday to the American Dialect Society mailing list on acronymphomania ‘fondness for acronymns’ and investigativive [rather than investigative] journalism, both caught on the radio, and added a note of complaint (slightly edited here):

Meanwhile, on an unrelated topic, it seems that this morning every page that Google pulls up in a web search comes with Google’s malware warning, “This site may harm your computer”. News searches don’t get the warning, but web searches do.

After a little while, the warnings vanished. This morning Chris Waigl e-mailed me this report:

The Guardian, amusingly, reported this under the headline “Google blacklists the entire internet” (here). (Note: Lowercase “internet” appears to be widely accepted now. It’s improperly used by the Guardian of course: they just blacklisted the web, not the internet.)